When placing oil production process containment vessels upon floating host structures it is essential to have the containment vessels occupy the minimum amount of floor space and further to configure the containment vessels in such a way that the swaying and tilting that is inherent to the heaving and rolling motion of the floating host structure as it responds to the natural wave action of the water upon which it rests, will have the least possible detrimental effect on the process performance.
Because the separating efficiency of containment vessels utilizing horizontal flow paths such as those described by my U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,865,992 and 5,902,483 is known to be superior to that of containment vessels employing vertical flow paths, to date horizontal containment vessels have been utilized most often.
The horizontal containment vessels have the disadvantage of occupying a relatively large floor space on the host structure and having their spatial process geometry appreciably affected by the swaying motion to the detriment of the processing performance.
My invention establishes a method and means for processing oil utilizing vertical cylindrical process containment vessels wherein a horizontal flow path for the processing scheme inside the vertical cylindrical containment vessels is established by a placement of baffles and/or bulkheads inside the vertical vessels to create a substantially horizontal flow path. This arrangement affords the separating efficiency of the horizontal flow path while occupying less floor space on the host structure and having the spatial process geometry of the containment vessel virtually unaffected by the swaying motion.